It Is Empowering To Understand Your Body

You learn early that starving yourself by skipping meals is a terrible way to try to control weight. He sees that Fred’s technique for engaging in an ongoing personal discovery process is a positive and productive way to take full advantage of his own intelligence and powers of observation, and so can you. The idea is that we will learn from the diary what to eat and what to avoid as well as have a better understanding of just how much we are eating. This is a great idea, except that we slip and often fail to actually do it. There is a much easier way to obtain the same information and effect, which we call the mirror technique. To do this, buy yourself a quality digital scale that will report your weight in pounds and tenths of pounds. Then procure some dry erase markers. Weigh yourself every morning at the same time. It’s easiest to remember to do this immediately upon awakening. Next, enter each morning’s digital weight with a dry erase marker on the mirror in your bathroom. Seeing the previous entries on the mirror will remind you to weigh yourself first thing. Unusual weight increases or decreases will stand out and cause you to think, What did I do and/or what did I eat yesterday to cause that change? Then you can write down in small writing by the increased/decreased weight entry what you did the day before that made a difference.

Ignorance Deprives People Of Freedom

You will become very conscious of your weight and what habits affect your weight with literally no effort. And, more important, you will have a record of what affects your weight instead of someone else’s theory of what should affect your weight. After even a short period, such as a month of keeping this record on your mirror, you will have learned a lot about your body and its response to diet and activities. Of course, after a couple of weeks, you will reach the bottom left side of your mirror and will need to erase these entries and start again at the top. Before erasing these entries, record a few simple things you have learned in small writing at the very top of the mirror, and add a little entry regarding how and why your weight evolved during these weeks. Soon, you will develop an intuitive feel for how your body responds to different foods. Stay away from bread, sweet rolls, and dinner rolls. Bread is generally consumed before a meal when you are hungry, so it is easy to eat quite a bit of it. Pasta has an adverse effect on his weight. Fred also avoids fruit juices, energy drinks, and soft drinks. They are full of sugar, and he gains weight whenever he drinks them. He’s learned to eat potatoes and white rice sparingly.

Easy Target

These carbohydrates add weight to his body. For snacks during the day, apples are ideal. Honeycrisp apples are tasty, full of fiber, and seem to have a rapid impact on his appetite. They also appear to have no adverse impact on his weight. Almonds are another great afternoon snack that boosts his energy and does not seem to affect his weight. In fact, he avoids candy and sugar as much as possible. Wine, however, does seem to adversely affect his weight, so he has learned to limit his consumption of wine to avoid putting on excess weight. It has a little more impact than fish and chicken, but not a lot more, even though it has much more fat. They are mainly water and can be made by removing a lot of fat. He’s just sharing what he has noticed over the years, tracking his weight and comparing it to what he ate or drank the night before. Try the mirror method and see what you can learn! In addition to supporting an increased knowledge of favorable and unfavorable diet items, the mirror system, over time, gives us insight into other aspects of health and weight control. For example, you will develop an understanding of how different types and intensity levels of cardio training translate into increments of body weight.

Don't Believe Everything You Hear

Finally, having displayed before you every day a graphic history of your weight over periods of time is of great importance. As we have noted earlier, rapid weight loss signals to our old genome that winter is coming and food will be harder to come by, which will drive our bodies to conserve fat and energy. On the other hand, we learn from the daily mirror record that slow weight loss results in plateauing, with the body losing 2–3 pounds and then adjusting to the new weight over a week or so. It becomes very easy to stay within a pound of a new target weight. It is empowering to understand your body. This knowledge will enable you to control your weight by developing a personal sense for what is going on. There is no compelling evidence to support this practice. Taking pills does not make up for bad eating habits. The fact that Americans spent $28 billion in 2012 on nutritional supplements is more a measure of good marketing than of robust health. It’s better to spend your time and money improving your diet. This is far more likely to pay off in the long run than popping a pill. How did this industry grow and have such an impact, and how has an industry boomed when there is no compelling evidence to support this practice? To answer these questions, let’s take a brief trip through the supplement business. All of them make it appear that the advertised products will have extremely favorable impacts on our lives. These two agencies jointly point out that dietary supplements may seem like harmless health boosters. But while some have proven benefits, many don’t. They caution that even ‘natural’ supplements can be risky and that medications you take or the medical conditions you have may make some supplements risky and inappropriate for you in particular.